“Isn’t what killed him kind of academic?”
“A sequence of events is a sequence of events. What he doesn’t know is that the damaged Buddha is an analog for his own head wound.”
Chuck pulled the needle out of his arm and looked blearily at Dr. Hypodermic. “I ain’t going anyplace and that’s a fact. Never leave the temple. That’s the key to everything. Never leave the temple.”
A grenade exploded somewhere on the other side of the Buddha. Jim pressed himself closer to the wall. “Is this supposed to be some kind of object lesson?”
Dr. Hypodermic shook his head. “It’s just part of the tour.”
“The tour?”
“We have big things planned for you, Jim Morrison. Shall we move on? Or maybe you want to stay here with Chuck? I’m sure we can set you up with a needle and a spoon and a poncho to keep the rain off. It’s a blissfully simple existence.”
Jim was having enough trouble keeping up with the shifts and surprises Dr. Hypodermic seemed to be springing on him. His mind felt seared from the previous plunge into discorporal pain. He sighed and leaned against the wall, letting the rain stream down his face. “Of course I don’t want to stay here. It’s a bliss I can very well do without.”
“Perhaps you’d like to go back to your Parisian bathtub?”
Jim shook his head. “You’ll do what you like, whatever I say.”
Dr. Hypodermic nodded. “C’est vrai.”
Jim smiled bitterly. “So you’ve got me. I give up. Roll me on to the next horror.”
***
“It’s gaining altitude.”
“It could actually be a bombing run.”
Semple was frightened, but she was also furious. She hadn’t allowed herself a full-blown tantrum in a very long time, but one was definitely boiling beneath the surface. “This is too fucking much. I swear. It just can’t happen to me. I’ve already been fucked up by one of Anubis’s nuclear weapons. It can’t happen twice. It just isn’t possible.”
Mr. Thomas was hardly the master of diplomacy. “It’s starting to look all too possible.”
Jesus leered at her. “It brought me to you, didn’t it?”
“And that was such a treat, wasn’t it? I got to watch you masturbate and talk to the goat.”
Mr. Thomas turned. He was clearly offended. “And what’s so bloody terrible about talking to the goat, may I ask?”
Jesus picked up the thread. “And what’s so bad about watching me masturbate? I’ve known women who were quite turned on by it.”
Semple looked at the two of them in furious bewilderment. “What’s with you two? How the fuck can you talk like that when one of Anubis’s psychotic flyboys is maybe going to drop an A-bomb on us?”
Jesus shrugged. “I’m Jesus Christ. Nothing can hurt me.”
Mr. Thomas also didn’t seem that concerned. “And I was tired of being a goat.”
“What about Gojiro? Anybody think about what happens to him?”
Jesus acknowledged this with a look of less-than-sincere sadness. “It will be a loss.”
Mr. Thomas nodded in agreement. “It will be a loss.”
Semple clenched her fists in frustrated fury. She would have punched Jesus, but she couldn’t see how it would do her any good. She also couldn’t see the point of screaming, but that didn’t stop her. “But what about me? I don’t want to be blown up by an atom bomb!”
Mr. Thomas was staring at the screen again. “A small object has just detached itself from the Flying Wing.”
***
“What is this place?”
“It’s one of the points where life and death interface.”
Jim and Hypodermic were standing together on a high ledge above a huge tunnellike cavern that seemed to stretch to infinity in either direction. The air was chill with a smell of mold and cold fungi, and Jim found himself shivering helplessly. His shirt was still soaked from the downpour in the Vietnam hallucination. The cavern was a dim, gloomy, twilit place, lit only by a faint white light in the far distance. It wasn’t the physical surroundings that held Jim’s attention, though. The flat floor of the cavern was consistently inclined so it formed a long continuous slope, like a never-ending ramp, and up this ramp trudged an endlessly moving tide of humanity. Heads shaved, every last one of them dressed identically in a shapeless gray coverall, they moved ever upward in a slow and weary lockstep, no military precision, but in rough ranks and rows, backs bent, shoulders drooped forward so their arms hung with a loose simian swing. They didn’t pause or even glance around at their surroundings, and their faces were made uniform by dour hopelessness. They didn’t speak, even to complain one to another, but the cavern was nonetheless filled with a perpetual, drawn-out, sighing whisper of absolute despair.
Dr. Hypodermic fixed Jim with a ruby laser gaze. “You hear that?
“What is it?”
“The breath of the dead.”
“And who are all these people?”
“A particular subsection of the recently deceased.”
“Subsection?”
The skull face displayed a singularly impatient contempt. “The regiments of the righteous, the drug-free, the ones who gratuitously ignored their imaginations and allowed their lives to be punctuated by TV commercials every eight minutes. The Great Double Helix can be a hard concept to grasp after a life of Diet Sprite, Touched by an Angel, the missionary position, and some corporate Insect King lunching on your slave-employee ass. These are the ones who did what they were told and just said no to everything that might have redeemed their miserable lives.”
“And where do they think they’re going?”
“They don’t have a clue. The only idea they have is to walk toward the light. That’s all they’ve ever heard. When dead, walk to the light. These ones will go to any white light that presents itself.”
“Will they ever make it to the pods?”
“Most will. When they finally manage to work it out. The recruiters will get some of them, though.”
“The recruiters?”
Hypodermic allowed himself a dry-bone, demigod laugh. “How do you think they keep Gehenna, Stalingrad, and Necropolis filled? Show them an Electric Xmas Tree Angel and they will follow you to the racks and the heated tongs of perdition.”
“How come I never saw this place?”
“You were one of my garcons. I spared you from this stage of things.”
“You mean I was too stoned to notice?”
“I mean you were always doomed to the fast track and the early conclusion.”
***
Semple watched transfixed as a dark speck dropped from the underside of the Flying Wing. It was so tiny that it could easily be mistaken for a fault in the screen’s image or a floating trick of the eye. That something so insignificant could pose such a terminal threat was all but inconceivable, but Semple was unfortunately all too able to conceive it. As she watched it fall, slowly at first, but rapidly gaining speed, she felt her body start to stiffen. Her legs felt weak and when she put a hand on the back of the couch to steady herself, her nails dug into the leather upholstery, red on black, causing deep creases. For a micromoment, she found herself fascinated by her own hand. Very soon it would be gone, never to be seen again. Her mind, even her soul, if she had such a thing, might continue, but this flesh was about to be vaporized, her body, her hair, her internal organs all gone, and the absurd comic book costume along with them.
She looked back at the screen and the bomb had grown larger. The second and third units showed that Gojiro had come to a complete stop and was sitting back on his tail staring up at it. As the bomb came silently down, one of the great reptile’s hands flashed out and, in a more-than-reptilian turn of speed, he caught the bomb. Semple, turning on her platform shoes, cringed from the screen, knowing that this move would have to detonate the nuclear device. After five seconds of nothing, she opened her eyes, scarcely daring to look. When she did look, she incredulously had to raise her superheroine visor, unable to believe what she was seeing. Gojiro sat, tossing the bomb up and down on the palm of his massive hand, not unlike George Raft with his trademark silver dollar. Quickly, she bit back a scream. “Is the damned lizard out of his mind?”